Her Own Society

A new reading of Emily Dickinson.

Dickinson had written hundreds of poems, kept hidden in sewn bundles, when she approached Thomas Wentworth Higginson.Credit MAIRA KALMAN

In April of 1862, Emily Dickinson wrote to a stranger, initiating a fervent twenty-four-year correspondence, in the course of which they managed to meet only twice. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, thirty-eight, was a man of letters, a clergyman, a fitness enthusiast, a celebrated abolitionist, and a champion of women’s rights, whose essays on slavery and suffrage, but also on snow, flowers, and calisthenics, appeared in The Atlantic Monthly. “Letter to a Young Contributor,” the article that inspired Dickinson to approach him, was a column addressed to literary débutantes and—despite his deep engagement with the Civil War—a paean to the bookish life: “There may be years of crowded passion in a word, and half a life in a sentence,” he wrote, evoking Dickinson’s poetry without yet having seen it. “Mr. Higginson,” she began, with no endearment. “Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?”

Dickinson was a spinster of thirty-one, birdlike in habit and appearance, with fine chestnut hair and abnormally wide-set eyes, whose color she compared to sherry. She lived in Amherst, Massachusetts, with her parents and her sister, Lavinia, next door to her brother, Austin, and his difficult wife, Susan, whom she adored. Her father, Edward, a prominent lawyer and the treasurer of Amherst College, had a heart that was “pure and terrible,” she told Higginson years later. (He found the old man more remote than forbidding.) Her mother, née Emily Norcross, was recovering from a nervous breakdown that had lasted several years, during which time the poet herself had become reclusive. The room where she worked, and spent much of her life, was furnished with a sleigh bed, a cast-iron stove, a bureau, and a writing table.

Dickinson came to Higginson in the guise of an unpublished novice, though by this point—middle age (she died at fifty-five)—she had composed hundreds of poems. Among them are some of the greatest ever written in English, but an English unique to her—an unworn language. It revives sensation at the extremities of feeling that, in most lives, habit and cliché have numbed. Few voices are more solitary than her first person, yet few are more intimate: she writes I to I. Richard B. Sewall, whose critical biography, “The Life of Emily Dickinson” (1974), is still unsurpassed, classed her with George Herbert, Wordsworth, the author of the Psalms and of Job, and, in her eerie genius for metaphor (a comparison that isn’t impertinent), Shakespeare.

It is hard to believe that Dickinson didn’t know who and what she was, even if no one else did. She kept her poems in a bureau drawer, sewn into bundles. But she had shared a few with her closest friends, among them her sister-in-law and Samuel Bowles—a driven man, famously attractive, like her new pen pal, and the editor of an influential newspaper, the Springfield Republican. Bowles had already printed three lyrics anonymously. She enclosed one of them in her note to Higginson (who then lived in Worcester) with three others:

Safe in their Alabaster Chambers—

Untouched by Morning—

And untouched by Noon—

Sleep the meek members of the

Resurrection—

Rafter of Satin—and Roof of Stone—

Grand go the Years,

In the Crescent above them—

Worlds scoop their Arcs—

And Firmaments—row—

Diadems—drop—

And Doges—surrender—

Soundless as Dots,

On a Disc of Snow.

Higginson, the radical, was a pious man. Dickinson, the dormouse, was a heretic who dared to call the dead suckers, conned of their heaven. Her sweetness of tone makes it easy to miss her bleak audacity. She didn’t, it seems, take much of Higginson’s advice (which we can only infer from her replies—his half of the correspondence disappeared), except for his suggestion that she delay publishing. But, lost at an anguished crossroads, she needed a Virgil. He had once risked his life to rescue a fugitive slave, and she was, in her way, also a fugitive.

Dickinson’s letter concluded with a request not to “betray” her. Higginson never did, but many scholars, including Sewall, consider that, through an excess of caution and a deficit of imagination, he betrayed her art. His first and perhaps instinctive reaction to her verse was a tough critique, though she thanked him for the “surgery.” In her next letter, she confided her inner turmoil: “I had a terror—since September—I could tell to none.” After that, he was more reassuring. On June 7th, she told him, “Your letter gave no Drunkennesss, because I tasted Rum before.” Baffled by the poems, beguiled by the woman, but, as a pastor, alarmed for the estranged soul, Higginson suggested that she find a friend. She actually had many, but she asked him to be her “Preceptor” (although he wasn’t the only man she flattered with that honorific). An invalid wife and the war, among other imperatives, preëmpted his attention, but, fitfully, he and Dickinson stayed in touch. “Sometimes I take out your letters & verses, dear friend,” he wrote in 1869 (one of only three messages to her that survived), “and when I feel their strange power, it is not strange that I find it hard to write. . . . If I could once take you by the hand I might be something to you; but till then you only enshroud yourself in this fiery mist & I cannot reach you, but only rejoice in the rare sparkles of light.”

In the course of their friendship, Higginson tried to lead this “wayward” sport of nature, whose rhymes were off, whose rhythm he called “spasmodic,” whose lines were strung tensely between dashes, and who claimed the modern privilege of refusing to signify what others expected her to mean in “the direction of rules and traditions.” (Her credo was “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant.”) After Dickinson’s death, in 1886, Lavinia asked Mabel Loomis Todd, Austin’s beautiful and ambitious mistress, to edit the poems, and Higginson to help her, lending the project his prestige. (Only ten brief lyrics had appeared in her lifetime, grudgingly surrendered, and without a signature. One was attributed to Emerson.) Todd sometimes went further than Higginson would have liked in taking liberties with Dickinson’s syntax, punctuation, and even her choice of words. He approved and took part in the cleanup, however. Their anthology was published in 1890, and reviews were mixed (some ecstatic, more disdainful), but almost immediately Dickinson acquired a cult following, mostly among women. They showed up in Amherst, asking directions to the Homestead, the Dickinsons’ Federal manor on Main Street, which has since become a museum. The collection quickly went through eleven editions and was followed by seven others, a memoir by Mabel Todd’s daughter, four volumes of letters, endless speculation about the poet’s secrets, and the rise of a myth. By the nineteen-fifties, Dickinson was part of the canon (almost no one graduates from high school without having read her). Her complete works—nearly eighteen hundred poems, edited by Thomas H. Johnson, and letters, edited by Johnson and Theodora Ward, three volumes of each—were enshrined in annotated editions that restored their formal integrity, revealing the magnitude of her power but also the depths of her strangeness.

Until Higginson held the first anthology in his hands, he had doubts about the wisdom of exposing to the world the runes of a protégée whom he had described as “my partially cracked poetess.” Yet the telling ironies in a relationship often aren’t the apparent ones, and in a trenchant new book, “White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson” (Knopf; $27.95), Brenda Wineapple sets out to discover what these two people saw in each other, and what they couldn’t see. In her view, Higginson’s epithet wasn’t dismissive, not to a romantic idealist who, into old age (he died at eighty-seven), kept searching for the portal to transcendence.

Wineapple is an astute literary biographer with a feisty prose style and a relish for unsettling received ideas. Social history—the taproot of character—is her forte, although one might also say that she has specialized in repatriating fugitive Americans: Janet Flanner, Gertrude and Leo Stein, and, most recently, Nathaniel Hawthorne. (He fits the mold if one agrees with Dickinson in defining the intellect as a patriot’s “Native Land.”)

Dickinson’s experience, or what we know of it, has been so thoroughly archived, interpreted, and reimagined in every genre (Sewall is exhaustive, and, before him, Jay Leyda, the modernist filmmaker and film historian, produced a monumental chronology, “The Years and Hours of Emily Dickinson”) that a contemporary scholar needs a good excuse to exhume the picked-over bones. In rehabilitating Higginson—dispatching the caricature of a tin-eared pedant—Wineapple finds one, and, through him, brings Dickinson into focus for a new generation. The poet’s impulse to seek sanctuary in isolation, and the militant’s to seek justice through intervention, should, she suggests, feel familiar to us in 2008. It’s an enduring schism in American history.

Wentworth Higginson, as he was known to his familiars, was the youngest of ten children, descended from a Puritan divine who had arrived in Massachusetts in 1629. A Dickinson landed in New England the following year. There was wealth, eminence, and political influence on both sides; a symmetry in the families’ associations with leading colleges (Wentworth’s father was a benefactor of the Harvard Divinity School); and a shared culture of civility and introspection. As Emerson’s friend Samuel Ward observed in a letter to Higginson after reading Dickinson’s poems:

She is the quintessence of that element we all have who are of the Puritan descent pur sang. We came to this country to think our own thoughts with nobody to hinder. . . . We conversed with our own souls till we lost the art of communicating with other people. The typical family grew up strangers to each other. . . . It was awfully high, but awfully lonesome.

Wentworth and Emily came of age, however, during a period of humanist ferment in politics, theology, and the arts—an American Enlightenment described by those who lived through it as “the Newness.” The young Higginson had dreamed of becoming a great poet, but Emerson, whom he revered, rejected his submissions to The Dial. He married a patrician cousin, Mary Channing, whose crippling ailment seems to have been rheumatoid arthritis. Wineapple describes this interesting character as “tart” and “cantankerous.” (Apropos of Dickinson, she once blurted out, “Oh why do the insane so cling to you!”) They were both devoted to the radical feminism of Margaret Fuller. A woman “must be a slave or an equal,” Higginson declared. “There is no middle ground.” To secure a livelihood, he became a minister, but, after two years, he resigned his pulpit, under pressure (he was too much of a reformer for his congregation), to militate for abolition. Dickinson would surely have followed his exploits in the Springfield Republican: his failed run for Congress; his arming of anti-slavery homesteaders in Kansas; his collusion with John Brown; his storming of the Boston federal courthouse to liberate Anthony Burns, the fugitive slave who faced rendition (a brave but inept fiasco). In November of 1862, Higginson took command of and began training one of the initial regiments of black soldiers to do battle for the Union—the 1st South Carolina Volunteers. Henry James, who sat out the carnage in Newport, Rhode Island, but whose brother Wilky was wounded in the massacre at Fort Wagner, in Charleston Bay, fighting with the 54th Massachusetts—the most famous black regiment—had the gall, years later, to mock Higginson’s “agitations on behalf of everything, almost, but especially of the negroes and the ladies.”

There was nothing obviously cracked about the young Emily, a brilliant student and a saucy gadabout with a streak of vanity that she never outgrew. She wrote for the humor column of her school magazine, and her letters, also full of gaiety and wit, often cartooned her family. (The Dickinsons, Emily included, were never quite as proper as they seemed; beneath their clannish façade of stiff-necked gentility roiled a soap opera of mad scenes, quarrels, and illicit passions. All of them, Wineapple writes, “loved with greedy ardor.”) She “rode out” with suitors, and, at, fifteen, after a trip to Boston, declared to a classmate, “The world holds a predominant place in my affections.”

Emily disparaged her education to Higginson, and, compared with his (at Harvard), it was rudimentary. But she spent the last year of her schooling as a boarder at the female seminary in South Hadley, Massachusetts, that became Mount Holyoke College. The classical curriculum (Greek, Latin, sciences, and literature) included strong doses of evangelical Christianity. A religious revival was sweeping New England, and the girls were urged by their headmistress to profess “hope.” Dickinson resisted defiantly, calling herself a “pagan.” Belief in God, and in salvation, always tempted her, as flesh tempts a saint, but the real perdition, as she saw it, was renouncing her freedom not to conform.

Dickinson’s life has a before and an after, separated by an invisible catastrophe, or perhaps by a critical mass of cumulative blows—spiritual concussions that contributed to her fragility, but also to the release of her creative powers, which came in a tremendous gush in her late twenties. She corresponded with a wide and diverse circle of friends—some ninety people we know of—but as she aged her world contracted like the footage of a blast rewound. By the time she was forty, she refused to leave the Homestead, except to see a doctor, even hiding on the second floor from acquaintances she had received for years; writing and reading after the household was asleep; tending the garden; and, until she gave up music, too, playing the piano. On several occasions, Higginson invited her to literary events in Boston, once to hear a talk by Emerson. But, much as she longed to see him, she was firm in “shunning” society. People, she explained, “talk of hallowed things, aloud—and embarrass my Dog—He and I dont object to them, if they’ll exist their side.” Bowles called her the “Queen Recluse,” but in reality she saw whom she chose: him, her brother, Higginson, some children, and a few others. Austin told Mabel Todd, with amusement, that his sister had “posed” in many letters. Her studied unworldliness—the virginal or bridal habit of a white dress; the lily proffered breathlessly to an exceptional visitor; the elfin figure fleeing at the sound of a doorbell; the pretense of “insignificance”—was also a form of camouflage:

The Soul selects her own Society—

Then—shuts the Door—

Dickinson’s father, respecting her seclusion, didn’t oblige her to attend church with the family, although he asked a local clergyman to examine her theological “soundness.” She apparently passed the test of faith the way her poems did, by seeming chaste and Biblical, if you weren’t paying attention. Steeped in devotional literature, she drew upon its language and cadences to record (and to dissemble) her solitary effort to accept that death is absolute. But death is also a metaphor for something even more fearful to Dickinson, the loss of self that often occurs in the delirium of infatuation and in the aftermath of a rejection. Higginson justly called her mist “fiery”: her work scintillates with erotic tension, and even in the letters she wrote him her lowered eyes seem more geishalike than maidenly. When Dickinson loved, she was capable of shameless, imperious, wanton rapture and abjection. Anyone down to earth was apt to recoil at the totality of her demand. Most of us, however, know what she means by “a pain—so utter—

It swallows substance up—

Then covers the Abyss with Trance—

So Memory can step

Around—across—upon it—

As one within a Swoon—

Goes safely—where an open eye—

Would drop Him—Bone by Bone.

Dickinson cultivated passionate friendships—complicities—with both sexes. One of her beloveds was Susan Gilbert, the lovely, combative orphan who married Austin and was Emily’s most trusted reader for some thirty years. The theory that Dickinson was a lesbian shares a Dewey-decimal classification with a raft of other case studies—Emily the sufferer, performer, healer, seducer, victim, hysteric, dog lover, mystic, feminist paradigm, vestal daughter, consumptive, agoraphobic. But, in the absence of God, Dickinson never ceased hoping for a savior in a mortal guise—indeed, in a virile guise, paternally enfolding. That, in part, may be why she sought out Higginson, and why he kept his distance, despite her importunity, confessing to his wife after the first of his two visits to Amherst, in 1870, “I never was with any one who drained my nerve power so much. Without touching her, she drew from me. I am glad not to live near her.”

The Homestead struck Higginson as a house “where each member runs his or her own selves.” Emily told him, “I never had a mother. I suppose a mother is one to whom you hurry when you are troubled.” The daughters of depressive women often feel a propitiatory impulse to make some sacrifice of their own aggression and desire, perhaps because they are afraid to overwhelm an unstable figure whom they depend on; because they feel guilty about their own vitality; or to disguise rage—as much from themselves as from their parent. In Dickinson’s case, Wineapple observes, mother and daughter both “exercised power in refusal.”

Her mother’s mental illness coincided or overlapped with three major markers in Dickinson’s biography: the “terror” she confessed to Higginson; the period of her greatest creativity; and a debacle that inspired her to draft at least three letters of heart-wrenching eloquence and infantile neediness to a lover, or a phantasm, whom she addressed as “Master,” imploring him to “open your life wide, and take me in.” Master’s identity is one of the most tantalizing enigmas of Dickinson’s story. There are two leading candidates. One is the dashing Bowles; the other, Charles Wadsworth, was a preacher famous for his oratory, who lived in Philadelphia but is known to have visited Dickinson at least twice. After his death, in 1882 (Bowles had died four years earlier), Emily described him as “my closest earthly friend.” Higginson, in many ways, fits their mold: an object of fantasy to many women; prominent in the world; and married. Dickinson told him several times that he had “saved her life” in 1862, though he never knew how. Perhaps it was enough that he picked her up, albeit gingerly, when she felt discarded. But she, in turn, gave him the immortality that his own good deeds and modest gifts as a writer wouldn’t otherwise have earned.

“White Heat” is written with a dry heat that does justice to its impassioned protagonists, but, as Wineapple’s pendulum shifts back and forth between them, it loses its momentum. Both lives wind down, their drive sputters out, and their paths diverge—the Newness was over. Higginson remarried after Mary’s death—a proper sort of wife this time, dainty and much younger. He finally fathered a much longed-for child (and, one gathers, enjoyed a long-deferred sex life).

During Dickinson’s final two decades, her poetic torrent was reduced to a trickle. She developed Bright’s disease, the kidney ailment that may have killed her. Her doctor also gave her a diagnosis of “nervous prostration,” and she told an old friend, “I do not know the Names of Sickness. The Crisis of the sorrow of so many years is all that tires me.” She, too, however, enjoyed a requited passion. Her elderly beau, Judge Otis Lord, of Salem, was a member of her father’s inner circle, and she had known him all her life. While it’s not clear whether their romance began before or after Lord was widowed, in 1877 (a late poem suggests that it had), it sparked an astonishingly candid, erotic correspondence that shows Emily expertly, if belatedly, playing hard to get. (“ ‘No,’ is the wildest word we consign to Language,” she teased him.)

At the end of a poem about solitude, possibly composed during the “terror,” Dickinson, describing the wind, plants one of her most self-defining lines, and one that is, typically, desolate and triumphant in the same breath:

He visited—still flitting—

Then like a timid Man

Again, He tapped—’twas flurriedly—

And I became alone—

Becoming alone is the description of a task that none of us escape, and it is the drama that gives Dickinson’s poetry its suspense. She expresses that suspense in all the seemingly random and eccentric dashes in her work that Higginson corrected. (He always wanted to make things right.) But they were her cracks, cracks through which the wind slipped in, and those other disembodied visitors, her metaphors and intuitions, and through which she evaded the necessity of putting a period to their mystery—or to her own. ♦

Sign up for the daily newsletter.Sign up for the daily newsletter: the best of The New Yorker every day.